Certification means SAP’s software has been tested and potentially modified to run on the AWS distributed and elastic compute and storage infrastructure, using pay-as-you-go, with customers expecting to receive support in the event of any problems.

Critically for customers, it means they can use SAP without need to buy and maintain their own servers.

Certification follows last month’s announcement that the SAP Hana One in-memory database platform had been passed for use on AWS and is available though the AWS Marketplace. You can see more about SAP's offerings on AWS here.

It’s a major development for both SAP and Amazon. Certification has long been the passport to mainstream use of a product as it means the suppliers providing both parts of the service have agreed to co-operate on the technology and support arrangements. It means customers aren’t out on their own or wondering what to do if there’s a problem.

For example, a major fillip to Microsoft’s SQL Server update was certification of SAP in the 1990s. Microsoft and SAP have since worked closely on support for latest versions of their software and on improving the performance of SQL Server and SAP together.

Formally putting SAP on Amazon should mean greater use of the German software giant’s trademark business apps in the cloud while it will open the door further to the enterprise and mid-market companies for Amazon on the back of SAP, meaning more compute and storage are consumed and meaning more money is spent on AWS. ®